Re: Haskell on ARM (was Re: [Haskell-cafe] ANN: Topkata)

Hello, I have, on two occasions made an *unregisterised* of GHC for the ARM (specifically the Maemo on Nokia 770). Mostly I just followed the unregisterised porting directions in the GHC user manual. I documented one attempt here: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ArmLinuxGhc Note: This procedure is for building a version of GHC that runs on ARM and generates ARM code. So, it is not build a cross-compiler, just a native ARM compiler. The unregisterised build is not that useful because: 1. no FFI 2. uses trampolining for tail calls 3. no threads I think 4. some other stuff I have forgotten So, the next step is to registerise the build. This is online a few lines a code. Basically stuff like: 1. add ARM support to the evil mangler (basically, a few regexps to strip prolog and epilogue stuff from the ASM) 2. #define which registers exist and what they should be used for 3. implement the tail call ASM 4. define some aspects of the C calling convention 5. (Optional), implement native assembly generation This is not a lot of code. However, it is very low-level code. I think that doing a registerised build is pretty easy, the *second* time you do it. The big problem is that there is pretty much no documentation on how to do it. (The porting guide does tell you, very generally, what needs to be done). Also, running GHC on an emulated ARM processor is slow. I think it took GHC 6.4 8+ hours to build. Now that many of the extra libs have been split out into the extra libs package, that should help significantly with the build time. If any does attempt to build for the ARM, please, please, please, document what you do in the wiki. And, if you do, edit the wiki as you go, you definitely won't be able to remember what you did after the fact. (Or, at the very least, use some program to capture everything you do so that you can refer to it later). And, finally, I heard vague rumors a while ago that made me think that GHC 6.10 might have a pure ANSI-C backend? Is there any truth to this? That would make porting much easier if it meant you did not have to do steps 1-4. j. ps. I would be happy to try to answer any questions if someone tries a port. I would still like to run GHC on my 770, and I hope to own an iPhone if they fix a few ommisions (bluetooth keyboard support, and similar stuff). At Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:12:33 -0700, Don Stewart wrote:

xj2106:

...

"Ariel J. Birnbaum" writes:

...

...

In the mean time -- who knows enough to make ghc target ARM, and get this to link against the iPhone libraries? This would be quite a coup if it could be made to run there! For that matter, there's another ARM-based target in which I'm interested: Nintendo DS. Has anyone got any Haskell code to run on one of these? PS: Maybe this discussion should be moved to a new "Haskell on ARM" thread?

I would be interested to see ghc running on Nokia n8xx or iRex iliad. Both of them are quite open linux based systems.

Jeremy Shaw had ghc targeting the nokia last year, iirc. Perhaps he'll have more info.

-- Don _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe